Posted
by
CowboyNealon Thursday April 20, 2006 @09:52PM
from the comeback-trails dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that wildlife has reappeared in the Chernobyl region even with high levels of radiation. Populations of animals both common and rare have increased substantially and there are tantalizing reports of bear footprints and confirmed reports of large colonies of wild boars and wolves. These animals are radioactive but otherwise healthy. A large number of animals died initially due to problems like destroyed thyroid glands but their offspring seem to be physically healthy. Experiments have shown the DNA strands have undergone considerable mutation but such mutations have not impacted crucial functions like reproduction. It is remarkable that such a phenomenon has occurred contrary to common assumptions about nuclear waste. The article includes some controversial statements recommending disposal of nuclear waste in tropical forests to keep forest land away from greedy developers and farmers"

It used to be that people would use "suspension of disbelief" to immerse themselves into a story.Now it seems like everyone is in need of "suspension of suspension of disbelief." Since when did it become fashonable to read fiction and believe all the hype therein?

If you read Dan Brown and take him as an authority on biblical history and truth and you read Crichton and ridicule him for bending the truth to support his FICTION you might need to take a step back from the novel you are reading and have a healt

Before.Though it had limited use.The one place it worked well was on the user home dirs. Quickly got to see who's accounts were bloated well above the average. Seing it as a bunch of 3D objects allows your brain to use the visual centers to perform averaging functions and such, much like the current GPGPU effort now that I think about it....-nB

I remember reading about thirteen years ago something similar about the Hiroshima radiation results on humans. The folks that were alive when irradiated had all sorts of the expected problems, and their kids too but to a lesser extent. The grandkids (and subsequent offspring) were showing no signs of the exposure.

Moreover let's scrutinize all this Chernobyl 'material' because disinformation rulz.

Sept. 2005: the Chernobyl Forum (IAEA, in fact), during a press conference, publishes an abstract of its draft report stating that 4000 people have and will die. But the name of the authors abstract and report was not known, it did not state that those 4000 people are from a small subset of the human beings concerned, the report did not contain the key sentence of the abstract, the report was presented as an UN report albeit it was not (it is published by agencies, and not published by UN), it was only a draft...

The abstract [iaea.org] (''4,000 people will die from the effects of the 1986 accident at Chernobyl'') was largely propagated (see for example this BBC's account [bbc.co.uk]). It was not definitive nor adopted by the UN, albeit presented as such.

Therefore those guys induced the whole media into spreading the ''Chernobyl: 4000 people will die globally'' during 7 months, albeit their ''best'' minimization is ''9000 people will die from from solids cancers amongst the approx 7 million who were in the vicinity''

This isn't terribly suprising as the people exposed to this radiation and their offspring probably procreated with people who were not exposed. This would mean the introduced changes would be diluted every generation. I would not go and jump to the conclusion that our DNA have some undiscovered repairing abilities or some other "x-men" type ability...

Actually, we have already discovered DNA repairing abilities. Virtually all organisms have some DNA repair ability.

Also the contamination now is not the same as the contamination 20 years ago. e.g. the article refers to horses being killed by radioactive iodine. This, along with any other short lived isotopes, is long gone from the environment.

The only way a child is going to be affected is if it is directly exposed or if the mother were to have an uptake of radioactivity large enough to expose (significantly) the child some time later. An uptake of this size would preclude the mother from living long enough to give birth.

No, it wouldn't.If the exposure was enough to damage the DNA in the Ovum (or sperm in the male, should mating have occured shortly after the bombing), then the offspring could have a genetic anomoly without the mother receiving

No. Every generation tends to get rid of bad mutations. It's called natural selection. While a few alarming but non-fatal mutations will occasionally be expressed, most mutations will simply result in reduced fertility due to terminated abnormal pregnancy. But wild animals are generally fecund enough to make up for the losses.

Consider that the average human conception has about three dangerous mutations even without Chernobyl. Why aren't we oatmeal? Because a goodly percentage of conceptions never make it past the blastocyst stage due to excessive nasty chromosomal damage, while we lucky survivors had fewer.

Chernobyl happened 20 years ago. Some species, like mice, have probably had several dozen, if not hundreds of generations. Even dogs rarely live 20 years, and I'd imagine wolves to be the same. If that's true, assuming that a wolf first reproduces on average at the age of 2, there have been 10 generations of wolves after the Chernobyl accident. In any case, there has been time for several generations to be born.

I highly doubt this has anything to do with mother nature adapting in a relatively short period of time. Stuff like that is for comic books. Radiation levels, while still incredibly unhealthy, have dropped considerably.

I would imagine animals and plantlife are not thriving or living as well as they should be. Radiation levels in outlaying areas have probbaly dropped to levels that allow life to screw faster then it is consumed by disease and cancer.

Heck people that lived in the chemical waste dump of Love Canal could still have kids... but in a toxic situation like that you're gon'a have a flipper baby or two, and life expectancy is going to be fairly bad.

This woman motorcycled through Chernobyl not to recently. In many parts radiation levels were safe enough for her to travel around. As I recall she carried a geiger counter, but didn't wear a radiation suit. She didn't venture around the epicenter of disaster, but she took a lot of rad photos, and saw wild life.http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/jour nal/articles.html [angelfire.com]

But who knows, perhaps radiation has produced a race of super bears which are immune to nuclear weapons. If so, someone should notify Steven Colbert.

It's not authorative but apparently Elena's story [angelfire.com] is a hoax [www.uer.ca]. According to the linked posting she was 30, not 26 at the time of writing and cannot ride a motorbike. According to the thread she is actually a tourguide [www.uer.ca] with Chernobylinterinform [chernobyl.info]. Sorry for ruining the fantasy.

That's good to know, but regardless of whether she's 26 or 30, or whether she rode a motorbike or a Jeep, the real question is whether or not the photos in the photo-essay are authentic. I've been reading through it and by and large I think the text is far less interesting and compelling than the photos.

Anybody have any clue as to the authenticity of the photos?

(Particularly, since we're talking about the wildlife in this thread, the ones of the mutant animals [angelfire.com]? Which she admits are not hers.)

As I recall, some of the photos were determined to be setups. Regardless, http://www.kiddofspeed.com/ [kiddofspeed.com] is a marvelously effective photo essay, so frankly I don't *care* if some parts are less than authentic.

As to the deformed calf, it's possible within the species; genes for similar deformities already exist. Could be whatever was a weak point in the genome that gave rise to similar mutations, is also a weak point that can be assaulted by radiation. (A theory I made up this very instant, but even so seems qu

This woman motorcycled through Chernobyl not to recently. In many parts radiation levels were safe enough for her to travel around. As I recall she carried a geiger counter, but didn't wear a radiation suit. She didn't venture around the epicenter of disaster, but she took a lot of rad photos, and saw wild life.

Those pictures turned out to be a hoax. The story was covered here.

My wife and I recently went on a tour of the Nevada Test Site [google.com] when we were in Las Vegas several weeks ago. These tours are arranged by the Department of Energy which outsources them to a private firm. Essentially you ride around on a bus in the Nevada Test Site all day and get a really cool tour of the blast sites, the craters, the house, the rails, etc. Unfortunately the tour does not allow cameras. As for us, we figured we have no plans to ever have any kids anyway and so we signed up for the waiting list. We got in on a cancellation and ended up on a bus full of senior citizens with our tour guide, Ernie, with decades of experience in the atomic testing program. Ernie tended to downplay the safety implications of the testing done on the site. Well, he did mention the leaks and accidents but his voice dropped really low whenever he talked about them... he used the phrase "well, I make no bones about it". Whenever Ernie's voice dropped, you could look out the window and the bus would be passing a fenced area along the side of the road with big scary RADIOACTIVE signs at regular intervals fighting to stay visible above the grass. Ernie was a trip. If you are interested in a tour of the Nevada Test Site go soon while Ernie is still alive to be your tour guide.

Sure, sure, he didn't go into serious detail, but he did state that adaptation occurred.

Most likely, those creatures that did not become sterile from the effect of radiation on their gonads had one or another sort of duplicated gene set (it happens a lot). Their children would then be less suceptible to radiation poisoning and their children less still. Eventually these animals would have a full or more duplicate of their entire DNA.

Those who suffered ill effects from it (ie: the animal equivalent of downs syndrome) would be less likely to survive, and so the ones that didnt - those that have mutated enough genetic machinery to allow such a duplication to exist (probably a small percentage, but a seed nonetheless) - would be more likely to propagate.

So yes, mother nature adapts. Mother nature is a generalized term for things on the cellular level that 'just happen'. It's not retarded, it's shorthand for those who don't feel like thinking too hard about a subject.

I mean, unless you think it was the noodly appendage of Our Lord, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

It's simple really... the creatures that survived were more intelligently designed than those that died.

Well, I have another interpretation of this statement: 'the creatures that died were selected to go to heaven before the other animals with the better-designed DNA.' So, which animals have the 'better-designed' DNA? The ones that died first and are now with the creator, or the ones still left foraging in the forest? Something else to think about. One could argue that the animals who went back home

Oddly enough, those characteristics that you consider "positive" in this situation are precisely those that the Flying Spaghetti Monster decided to bless this new generation of animals with.Verily I say unto you, they HAVE been touched by His Noodly Appendage. Ramen.

Lots [ccoc.net] of people refused [digitaljournalist.org] to leave the Black Zone, and the government didn't make them. Lots of the ones left behind died of cancer or thyroid problems. But lots didn't. They farm land that's so radioactive the crops have problems, but some of them are still alive. People have children in the black zone, and only 15-20% [hbo.com]of them DON"T have serious health problems.

Actually, at geosync orbit altitudes, the earth's escape velocity is ~4.3km/s. And you gain a good deal of orbital velocity (~3km/s) when going up a space elevator, which can be converted into escape velocity. So you only really need a delta-v of ~1.3km/s to escape earth's gravity once you're at the top of a space elevator (compared to ~11km/s from earth's surface).The earth's ~30km/s velocity in orbit around the sun has no real impact on this scenario. Once you hit earth's escape velocity, you're effecti

But, in any case, dumping all our radioactive waste in the sun would be a horribly short sighted squandering of a potentially precious resource for the future. Heavy metals don't exactly grow on trees you know.

An excellent point, one that I think can't be said enough. While we're burying all this nuclear waste, or tossing it down into the Marianas Trench, or whatever, I think it's important to consider that while the storage method should be able to last as long as the longest-lived dangerous isotopes in the waste (in case we just want to leave it there) it should also have as a design criteria the ability for us to recover it.

I could easily envision a time in the future, a lot sooner than 10,000 years or even a few hundred, when we might want to get at some of that "waste" in order to reprocess it in ways that are not economically viable, or perhaps technologically feasible, right now.

This is hugely the case with the type of nuclear energy we use in the United States, where the majority of the fuel rods are comprised of U-238 and only a small percentage of it is U-235, the latter is the fissionable fuel, the former isn't (although it can be bred into Plutonium) and currently we really just use it as a sort of contaminant in order to make weaponization of the fuel difficult. A change in attitudes regarding breeder reactors would instantly make U-238, particularly the stuff that comes out of reactors (which has greater-than-trace amounts of plutonium in it already) a hot commodity. (No pun intended.)

Frankly given our energy requirements, I think the need to reprocess nuclear fuel waste may occur sooner rather than later, perhaps within a few centuries or even decades, depending on technological developments of other energy sources and the geopolitics of Uranium mining, and thus the solutions for waste storage that are recoverable while also being secure are the best ones.

Not all damage to DNA from radiation is harmful. Cells have repair systems and can quickly repair breaks in DNA, with no long-term cellular consequence. Alternatively, the repair may not return the DNA to its original form, but may retain its integrity. If cellular damage is not repaired, it may prevent the cell from surviving or reproducing, or it may result in a viable but modified cell. These two outcomes have different results, leading either to deterministic or stochastic effects [Court of Appeals, 1999, pp. 37, 38].

It's not hard to imagine many of the conceptions about radiation exposure may have been a bit over estimated, simply because nobody has really been willing to undergo an experiment of that caliber. I would not believe the animals are enjoying their radiation poisoning however until I was able to ask them.

This is ENTIRELY hypothetical...But say we take, I dunno, the whole planet...and just douse it in some radiation. Just enough to cause a variety of small, minor mutations in a very large (or the entire) population.

1) Any ones that result in sterility are gone, end of story...

2) Lots of small minor mutations is more like tickling the DNA, whereas massive exposure and major mutations is more like kicking it. This results in a greater survival ratio.

That's how they produce heavily resistant strands of bacteria (to just about everything -- not just radiation)Grow a colony in a petri dish. Nuke it until only 10% remain. Let it repopulate back to the original population, repeat ad infinitium.

The bacteria you get at the end are frighteningly hard to kill.

(That said, there is very limited data on the health effects of living in an environment with higher-than-normal (but not lethal) background radiation. Many of the people who survived chernobyl with n

> But say we take, I dunno, the whole planet...and just douse it in some radiation.>> Transiently accelerate evolution, yanno?

If by "transiently accelerate evolution" you mean "give lots of people cancer", then that'd probably work quite well. If you're looking for something more beneficial to humanity than millions of people dying in agony, well, I think you'd best keep looking.

Don't think that because animals can survive in the region it's somehow beneficial to them. They'd still survive and populate the region if you took a machete and hacked pieces off of each animal, but they wouldn't be "improved" by the process. "Crippled but alive" is an improvement over dead, but it's a far cry from "whole and healthy".

You are aware, I hope, that this sort of thing is going on RIGHT NOW? Sadly, not as a government conspiracy to make killer mutant soldiers, although that would be cool.It has, in fact, been going on since.... (checks watch)...the beginning of time. What we call "background radiation" is doing exactly what you talk about, it triggers mutations during cell division. Just not at a rate high enough to kill us as a species, because we've evolved protective measures to cope with it.

Come on. Is anybody really surprized? Scientists for years were questioning the necessity of Chernobyl evacuations and creation of the excluded zone (some evacuations were necessary but the zone was generally too broad). The stress due to evacuations was more harmful than the radiation. In the official
UNSCEAR report [unscear.org], these voices were included. People can safely live there now so why not the animals? The radiation level in the "zone" is no more than 10mSv/year. Although it is above the average world natural background radiation (2.4 mSv/year), there are a lot of places where people receive larger radiation doses without ANY harmful effects including Ramsar in Iran, where the doze is 260 mSv/year [uic.com.au], 26 times larger than in the Chernobyl zone.

It is known (although ignored in strict radiation regulations) that the same dose received in short time is much more harmful than the dose received during longer times. It is probably because the cells have repair mechanism that can cope with small damage over long time while cannot efectively repair large damage in short time. There are even indications that small doses can be beneficial [wikipedia.org] by "training" the repair mechanism.

Don't act like you know what you are talking. There is a split in opinions, mainly between the IAEA and many scientists over the number of deaths caused by the catastrophe. The IAEA estimates about 60-something deaths total, while most actual estimates list 50,000+ deaths (short and long-term). Please search for pictures of deformed children that are still born today and the terrible effects the radiation had in the long term.Please dont falsely publish what your opinion as facts.

I think your argument would be better if you could cite some of your sources (the parent post had couple of links to support his/her point). I guess I could just google it but how do I know I'm looking at the same sources that you used to make your argument?

Also, pictures of deformed babies don't really support your argument either way except to include emotional aspect to this argument. Deformed babies are born everyday. What I think would be important is the number of deformed babies and type of deformalities compared to "normal" population.

I didn't discuss the effects of the dose people received just after the catastrophe. There is still debate about the number of deaths that can be attributed to the accident. But even this number of deaths is not astronomical. Even though the pictures of deformed children make a good emotional journalistic story, they can be found in any hospital anywhere and they are not a proof of anything. An the UNSCEAR report linked in my post above does not show evidence of increase in deformities.

Does anyone know if people in these areas have genetic differences that help them survive the higher local radiation?

Well, I'm not an expert in radiation medicine but it seems that they are indeed less susceptible to radiation. I found an article where they radiated lymphocytes from the blood of Ramsar's inhabitants and observed [health-physics.com] that "inhabitants of high background radiation areas had about 56% the average number of induced chromosomal abnormalities of normal background radiation area inhabitants follow

Absolutely not. There is complete agreement that around 60 people died from the effects of the accident (afaik 56, but some more will undoubtedly die from thyroid cancer).The disagreement is about the estimated additional deaths due to long term effects. WHO expects 4000 death among liquidators and the most exposed civilians with reasonable confidence and around 5000 more among the rest of the worlds population, but that number is so badly supported, it could be completely wrong. Eco-Wackos "expect" anyt

Possibly, the conceptions regarding what radiation exposure does to screw up those exposed are relatively true.Perhaps the understanding of just how freakishly robust nature can be in coming back from devastating damage is where the misunderstanding comes in.

In the first generation, massive radiation exposure deaths did destroy the population and had a massive effect on birth rates for that generation.

However, in nature, ecosystems are just that - systems. With most predators dead and most of the same speci

"Experiments have shown the DNA strands have undergone considerable mutation but such mutations have not impacted crucial functions like reproduction. It is remarkable that such a phenomenon has occurred contrary to common assumptions about nuclear waste."

Ummm... the animals are radioactive and their DNA has undergone considerable mutation. What exactly is contrary here to the common assumptions of radiological contamination? Sure matches my own assumptions.

Sure they can reproduce but I wouldn't exactly be jumping with glee over this "recovery". The damage merely has yet to express itself.

Though if any of the local turtles grow to human size and start dressing like ninjas, I'll take back everything I said.

The offspring you find in the wild is pretty normal. Of course, just about all offspring that does exhibit deleterious phenotypic expression die very quickly, and is in most cases spontaneously aborted long before birth. Most species can produce a lot more offspring than actually survive to adulthood (and most species do usually produce slightly more, as a hedge), so dramatically higher infant mortality or aborted pregnancies would just be compensated for by having more pregnancies and larger klutches in the first place. Of course, to some extent the mortality is lowered by the lack of human activities. You could hypothesize a donut-shaped overall mortality graph with the senter around the reactor and the outer edge at the edge of normal human habitation. Near the center you'd have high mortality from the radiation effects, and high mortality in human-habitated areas, but in between there'd be a sweet spot, with just a small increase in radiation mortality completely swamped by the lack of humans.

In fact, it would be really interesting to see a study of klutch size among birds nesting at the plant compared to the same species at various distances away from the area.

I wonder how much of a factor evolution might be in the resistance of these animals (in addition to the overall decrease in radioactivity after the accident). For example, the article mentions that the first generation or two after the accident tended to have deformities, but current generations don't. Perhaps only the animals which were resistant to deformities were able to reproduce and pass on their radiation-resistant genes to the next generation?One could test this by seeing if "control" animals from o

I'd imagine that pollen is accounted for just as dust, and outside of a specific radius the concentration is likely to be safe. Even if an irradiated pollen yielded a plant far from Chernobyl, the concentration of radiation would still be very low throughout the plant as a whole.

I am not that surprised really, that is what natural selection is about. The DNA coding for many genes also has quite a bit of redundancy built in, naturally with large radiation doses critical genes may be damaged, but given enough time favourable mutants will arise.

It reminds me of the large scale experiments done on plant breeding [1] where radioactive material was placed in the centre of a field of crops, and favourable mutants were selected. I love telling this story to anti-GE people, who probably eat plant products produced as a result of these experiments done predominantly in the 1970's. At least with GE only a single well studied change is being made.

These animals are radioactive but otherwise healthy. A large number of animals died initially due to problems like destroyed thyroid glands but their offspring seem to be physically healthy. Experiments have shown the DNA strands have undergone considerable mutation but such mutations have not impacted crucial functions like reproduction.

Well, a lot of animals have life cycles under a year. Even bears don't often live past 20, right? And they become sexually mature and reproduce within a few years.
The radiation wouldn't interrupt the life of short-lived animals.

So, not everyone living in an irradiated area will have their flesh falling off, but for us long-lifed humans, the life would be filled with more misery and an early ending. Maybe cancer at 20. And for normal human socities, "old farts" (those over 30) are really what drive the society.

I took classes from a professor studying worms and spiders in the Chernobyl area, and he found remarkable genetic mutations (e.g., changes in the number and size of chromosomes, large sections of additional DNA, etc.) and behavioral changes (e.g., worms switching to from asexual to sexual reproduction).

Since these organisms have such short lifespans, there have been ample generations since the nuclear accident for the organisms to go locally extinct or mutate into different species. But, that has not been the case. These local populations have continued to survive without deleterious effects on the population level.

Populations of organisms with longer lifespans may take longer to recover to pre-blast levels (although from the sound of the article and my previous knowledge the opposite has occurred) and may experience a genetic bottleneck effect (which may be countered by mutations), but genomes are resiliant and it is unlikely that the populations would never recover.

Gather around. Come one, come all. Time for the great DigiShaman to make a prediction... AhemLet see now. According to the extreme environmentalists, it's human activities that are causing the greatest harm to the planet. We also know that while radiation is bad for humans, it's not bad for natural life. Ergo, radioactive material is *good* for the planet.

Soon, I expect environmentalists (the extreme wacko kind, not all mind you) to endorse nuclear technology. Not just any technology, but the kind designed

It has been postulated that life wouldn't exist the closer one gets to the center of the galaxy because of the ambient radiation, and, in fact, a system with life would need to be positioned the same as our solar system is to avoid the radiation. But if life on Earth can adapt to high radiation so quickly, how much that does that improve the chances of life near the rim of the galaxy where the ambient radiation is higher but not so incredibly high?

The article pointed out that the radiation has kept humans out, and allowed wildlife to thrive.

...He went on: "I have wondered if the small volumes of nuclear waste from power production should be stored in tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by greedy developers".

Let me assure you, this is no protection against greedy developers. In our own city (Chesapeake), there is a section called Deep Creek that had a dump. Said greedy developers wanted to develop said dump; local residents fought it on the basis of contamination and danger to homeowners. Said developer waited twenty years until said homeowners no longer had the strength or will to say said statements before the zoning board. Then the City Council quietly gave permission, after which a housing development was built upon said dump, and after that homeowners discovered trash and contamination under their houses. Said houses had to be destroyed, said developer profited and moved on, said city council bided their time, and in the end only the purchasers were hurt, as far as I know. Said greedy developers will not be stopped by so minor a thing as radiation in the way of their profit.

To give a reliable overview, you'd have to track ALL the animals there and observe the population. Here is what you would find:

Some die instantly at the blast.Some die within the next hours.Some die within the next days/weeks/months.Fertility goes DOWN, but those THAT have offspring will have a higher chance to raise them to maturity (less competition).Again, of those some will die due to mutation.Some will have a shorter life expectance. As long as they mature and can raise at least one generation of offspring, it's not so important.Also keep in mind that quite a few animals CAN only raise one generation of offspring, they die after giving birth/laying eggs.

Bottom line, of course animals will survive, as a group. Humans would too, the body count would be incredibly high and the chance that YOU, as an individual, survive, is incredibly small. But as a species, you can fairly reliably survive a nuking.

I for one, disagree, with this simplistic argument. For example, when we use coal or fossil fuels, more damage is done, but it is distributed, and less visible (and easy to take pictures of the victims).

Unfortunately her site has been shown to be fake. Yes, she took the pictures, but it was on the official, guided tours that are done in the area. (Note that no pictures inside the secure area include her motorcycle, and that there is clearly at least one other person along to take some of the photos.)

So enjoy the photos as undoctored, but take the entire story line with a large grain of salt.

Of course uranium is a natural source of energy. All sources of energy are natural. For that matter, so is petroleum, which also has to be refined in order to be useful. Or perhaps you meant "renewable", which for the most part is just enviro-speak for "solar energy". Besides, if we reinstitute the breeder-reactor program, nuclear power is also pretty damn renewable.

The problem with nuclear energy is not that it can be unsafe. Of course it can... if handled as badly as the Russians did it is an unmitigated disaster. Contrast that with the Three Mile Island event, which did in fact melt a lot of equipment but so far as nuclear accidents go was a success because containment wasn't breached. Yes yes, there was a minor release of gas but the two events cannot be compared in terms of severity, no matter how much some people want to. Besides, the French seem to be doing a substantially better job with their nuclear program, which just goes to show that the bulk of the concerns about nuclear power (at least in the U.S.) are politico-economic more than technological.

The problem is that society wants an absolute, iron-clad guarantee that a particular technology is safe... and you can never have that, not when dealing with the energy levels a high-tech civilization requires. As an engineer I can tell you this much: everything is a trade-off. Everything is: it is the nature of our reality. A trade-off is a decision, a balancing act between the costs, risks and benefits of different approaches to solving a problem. In this case, by choosing to not develop nuclear power to any useful degree we are choosing to go down a different path, one which also has serious consequences. As fossil-fuels go, coal isn't exactly safe you know, and supplies of fuel oil and natural gas will continue to be uncertain for the foreseeable future. At some point in the not-too-distant future we will have to make a decision, whether we want to or not.

You simply cannot have your cake and eat it too, at least not in the context of our current technology.

Sure, you can promote tidal power, wind power, solar power or {insert favorite alternative energy source here}. If such a source is going to generate enough power to significantly offset our use of fossil fuuels it will have economic and environmental impact, probably serious ones. Worse yet, none of them are really energy-dense enough to handle our power needs. Take a typical 2400 megawatt nuclear plant for example. Yes, they are very expensive, but so would be the physical plant required to generate and store enough solar power to provide the same level of service. Regardless, we (for a variety of reasons) may choose to make that investment. But we'd best do it with our eyes open and be willing to accept the downsides of whatever road (or roads) we decide to travel.